THE Chinese are particular about their teapots, and the Zisha teapots, produced in Yixing in China’s Jiangsu province, are considered the best.
Zisha teapots are made from purple clay -about 1 kg of Zisha can be extracted from one tonne of raw clay.
It is believed that tea brewed in a Zisha teapot will not develop an overboiled taste nor will it turn sour when kept A Zisha teapot will also absorb the tea and after long usage, one can enjoy cups of tea from the pot by just adding boiling water without using any tea leaves.
About 100 200 Zisha teapots, priced between $ 28 and $ 1,388, are being displayed daily at Takashimaya SC Shopping Centre until Oct 22.
The first Zisha teapot was created during the Ming dynasty, by a pageboy named Gongchun.  Some teapots have been collectors’ items alongside Chinese calligraphy, jade carvings and snuff bottles.
Rare productions, by well-known teapot craftsman Gu Jingzho, can well fetch $ 120,000 in Hongkong art and crafts shops.
All the Zisha teapots made from the area bear the stamp of the craftsman.  It takes approximately two months to produce a handcrafted teapot decorated with calligraphy and paintings from literati.
To preserve a pot’s uniqueness, each craftsman in the Jiangsu factories does not produce more than 10 duplicates from each design.

Well, I use the teapot only metaphorically, really. I’m more interested in conveying ideas than I am tea. In 1980, I first came to Montana. I love the expansive landscape. But I don’t know that the landscape really affects the work. I’m working out of a political landscape, really. I’m getting good reduction. I’ve reduced the, uh, oxygen level in the kiln. The flames just come jumping out because they’re literally seeking oxygen. Just putting a little more gas in so it’ll fire a little quicker. I do about a four day firing cycle. Drives my wife crazy. Uh, you know, I get up every two hours to check the kiln. I was born in Chicago shortly after World War II. (projector clicking) I’ve always made things by hand. When I was a kid, I was constantly making models. My father was an immigration lawyer. We had many gifts from Chinese clients in our house. And so, from a very early age, I became very fascinated with the intricate, with detail, with very tight meticulous carving. When I was a kid, I remember seeing the very stark footage of the discovery of the concentra-tion camps. The piles of bodies. Had a very, very strong impact on my life. I’m carving ears. There are two different clays that I layer so that what I get in the end is something that looks very much like sedimentary rock. It’s part of this ongoing project that I call “The Legacy Project.” And it consists of a pile of ears. The pile keeps changing and there’s so many different layers of meaning. You know, the fact that ears have long been used as a way of counting the dead in war. The other thing about the pile of ears is I was very much trying to recapture the sense of the pile of shoes after the Holocaust, the remains of people that are gone. So they are ears that are stone-deaf. They’re not learning the lessons that are all around us. You know, I work from a place that’s deep inside me. That-that I’m very passionately angry about. I’m pissed off that there are nuclear weapons, you know? If an artist can’t say what they really feel in their heart, you know, what the hell is the point? (strained): Okay… Got it. The vessel is really the primary canvas of ceramics. And the yixing teapot is the most complex of vessels. You can really play with a lot of images and juxtapose a lot of different images to build a narrative. Urban destruction from World War II becomes a teapot. This is the handle… uh, the lid right here, this kind of lifts out. And, uh, this rubble creates a vessel which connects with this kind of tilted, broken chimney which becomes a spout. The teapot was literally invented in Yixing, China, about 1,500 A.D.. Suddenly, there is an explosion of creativity. All different forms, from segmented forms to natural forms to geometric forms. I’m inspired by these pots. I’m inspired by the craftsmanship, the finesse of line, the compositions. But while I imitate the pots in a technical, and sometimes esthetic sense, I’m not making Yixing pots.

There is only one way to make tea the creative skill lies in the pot. HUGH PEARMAN plots a 4,000-year history of ornament
Teapot design is a folk art in itself, with entire museums dedicated to it.  But then there is a lot of ground to cover. All teapots derive from ancient Chinese tea vessels, and the best Chinese teapots have always been those from Yixing: red, brown or buff, usually unglazed. These have been around since a couple of centuries BC, but Europe only latched on to them in the 17th century, when trading with the Far East began.
Thousands of Yixing pots were shipped over to Holland and Britain in the first tea cargoes. There is evidence to suggest that they were piled into the ships as much for ballast as for export potential. Once spotted in Europe, however, they were instantly copied. After all, you have to make tea in something.
In Britain, tea was first offered to the public as a drink at Garraway’s coffee house in Change Alley, City of Lon-don, in 1657. It was first advertised as a wonder drink in newspapers in 1658, and finally found its way down the throat of that dabbler in all things fashionable, Samuel Pepys, in 1660. There was no looking back after that. By 1760 Britain was importing 4.5m tons of tea annually, so much that it threatened to ruin our balance of trade. We got round that by paying the Chinese with Indian-grown opium, which led to all kinds of trouble, but let’s not get into that here.
There’s a shock in store for those who believe that the Ur-teapot is the British ”Brown Betty”, the satisfyingly simple and cheap, round glazed teapot that has been made, in a range of sizes, since the mid-19th century.  Those who revere this design must learn to live with the fact that it is a comparatively recent innovation. The history of teapots, because of the ceremonial nature of tea drinking, is a history of ornamentation. The ”novelty” teapot is as old as tea drinking itself.
The Chinese loved, and still do, making teapots in any number of bizarre shapes: looking like elephants, clumps of bamboo, fish, shells, birds, dragons, wrestlers, assorted fruits, anything at all rather than a basic shape (although there are occasional exceptions, such as a surprisingly modern, clean-cut rectangular pot made in Yixing in the early 1800s). So it comes as no surprise to find that, once Dutch and English and German potters started making their own pots to cash in on the tea-drinking craze, they, too, added perceived value to their products by embellishing them. The novelty pots of today, in the shape of JCB diggers, TV sets, saucy ladies or four-packs of lager, are absolutely in the traditional bloodline of the teapot. Tasteful modern designs are the aberration.
However, the Chinese never neglected the importance of flavour. Although they also produced dainty porcelain pots and cups (hence ”china” as a general description), that was for special occasions. For everyday use they favoured the Yixing ware, which was not only unglazed but meant to be unwashed. Tea deposits would build up over time, and fingermarks would turn the reddish pots nearly black round the top, but the tea would taste delicious. Some British tea aficionados still take the view that the pot is best left unwashed.
In fact, most of the tea-time habits we think of as quintessentially British are merely mild variants of Chinese or Japanese ones. Taking tea in the afternoon is one such import. Putting milk and sugar with it (despite beliefs to the con-trary) is another. The Chinese never put milk with their green tea, but liked a dash of hot milk with black tea, and were very happy with sugar.
The English potter John Dwight made the first copies of China ”redware” pots in Fulham in 1684. His techniques were copied by the Elers brothers from Holland, who set up a factory in Staffordshire. They, in turn, were copied by John Astbury, who pretended to be a simpleton and worked in the Elers factory for 18 months, learning the tricks of the trade. Astbury started producing fantastical glazed pots in the shapes of animals and houses. Josiah Wedgwood, recently set up in business, quickly latched on to the commercial potential of teapots made in the newly invented creamware, and the mass market had arrived. It took the invention of Spode bone china in 1800 to complete the Europeanisation of something the Chinese had been able to do for centuries.
Although coffee drinking arrived at about the same time as tea, coffeepots never attracted the same design atten-tion as teapots. Partly this was because making tea was such a simple thing: there is only one way to do it. In contrast, there are any number of ways of making coffee, and most of the effort went into improving the technology rather than the look of the object.  Apart from burnished copper Lyons’ Corner Houses tea urns, there is no tea-drinker’s equivalent of the seductive machine ethos of espresso machines.  Nor was there a coffee-lover’s equivalent of the Far Eastern tea ceremony to import. Tea was always more fashionable in Britain: family portraits of the time usually show them taking tea, while Continental equivalents are more likely to show the apparatus of coffee. The Dutch, however, who arguably discovered tea before the English, were even more wildly enthusiastic about it, to the extent that their characteristic canalside summer houses became known as tea houses.
The ”good design” buffs have long tried to tame the wild excesses of the teapot, with only limited success. Wedgwood’s neo-classical designs in black basaltware appealed to an early generation of taste-makers.  The Victorian proto-modernist, Christopher Dresser, produced a startlingly contemporary cubist pot, and chaste silversmiths and ce-ramicists, through to today’s producers of modern classics such as Queensbury Hunt, have kept up a good supply of clean designs for modern-minded people. What sells in the auction rooms, however, is more likely to be a brash Clarice Cliff tea set from the 1930s art deco mixed with fauvism or souvenir pots from the heyday of the seaside resort.
Even more than these, the popularity of the ”English cottage” teapot never wanes. As Edward Bramah, the tea expert and museum-keeper, has remarked: ”There must have been enough of them potted over the years to build a city.” Square or rectangular pots are inherently unstable to pour because of the way the tea surges from side to side. House-shaped pots, however, have always been around. The Chinese had them, the first English potters did them, thousands are still made. Why? Nobody knows. Me, I’ve got two sizes of Brown Betty and that’s fine for me. A dash of milk and no sugar, please.

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THIS is the week to commune with contemporary teapots at museums in and around New York. A good number of these teapots were never intended to brew chamomile, but they are bound to cause constant comment among viewers. They have loose lids, these pots.
“What’s nice about some of the teapots here is that they deny their function,” Garth Clark, a ceramic historian, was saying as he strolled through an exhibition and sale of 250 teapots, cups and accessories, which runs through Sunday at the American Craft Museum at 40 West 53d Street in Manhattan.
The teapot, you see, has gone the way of that other major domestic icon, the chair. Just as architects have taken to designing chairs that encourage standing, so artisans are making teapots that do not hold water. In an age when the tea ceremony boils down to dropping a bag in a cup, does it matter?
Though its spout may seem vestigial, the modern teapot still triggers old-fashioned sentiments about home and mother. It does so even among people who never drink tea and whose mothers never made tea.
“Memories,” the folk singer Judy Collins murmured. She was at a benefit preview of the teapot show, gazing at a pot encrusted with bits of colored glass and crockery. It was made by her sister Holly Collins, a California ceramist.
“It evokes nostalgia for your grandmother’s day,” Judy Collins said.
“Not our grandmother’s,” Holly Collins said.
Across the gallery Mr. Clark, the show’s honorary chairman, was noting teapots that deny their function.
He paused before Kenneth Ferguson’s pot of black stoneware with a hare on its handle. “You’d have to be Attila the Hun to pick it up,” he said with a small smile. As for Douglas Peck’s sleeping-dog-in-a-garden teapot of terra cotta, he warned, “The handle’s twisted the wrong way and watch out for the thorns.”
At the Newark Museum, the decorative arts curator, Ulysses Dietz, was preparing “Strong Tea: Richard Notkin and the Yixing Tradition,” to open Saturday and run through Sept. 1.
The show, organized by the Seattle Art Museum, includes 25 pots by Mr. Notkin, an Oregon artist whose work combines the craftsmanship of the ancient potters of Yixing, China, with contemporary social and political issues. Teapots in the shapes of human hearts, light bulbs, skulls and nuclear reactors are featured with photographs of the Yixing prototypes.
There is also an exhibition of 100 tea and coffeepots from the Newark Museum’s permanent collection. Mr. Dietz said the tea in these pots is not weak either.
“You’ll find some pretty wild stuff in the 18th century,” he said. “Pots that are useful but extremely sculptural: hens, parrots, squirrels. And weird stuff: a Chinese pot made for the Dutch market, painted black, with pictures of turbaned Nubians playing trumpets.”
Except for George Ohr, a maverick potter whose crumpled and twisted “clay babies” rattled teacups in the early 1900’s, teapots were largely functional until about 1980. Then Peter Shire came along and the pot went architectonic. Mr. Shire’s work is not represented at any major show around town right now, but there is a new book about him, “Tempest in a Teapot: The Ceramic Art of Peter Shire” (Rizzoli , $27.50).
A California sculptor and furniture designer, Mr. Shire makes pots that reflect his association with the Memphis group in Italy. He considers the teapot one of the most complex and difficult exercises in clay: “The Holy Grail of pot-tery.”
To the bodies of his pots Mr. Shire attaches outlandish appendages, whirls of beams and tubes; the Los Angeles Freeway is a muse. He says his pots will pour, but because they are confrontational, “you’d have a hard time grabbing them.”
Nor could you get a handle on the 200 pots at the American Craft Museum, as they were set on pedestals and boxes. But 40 of the potters were accessible enough at the benefit. They were the ones wearing teapot pins and holding wineglasses.
While most of the artists headed for the bar, tea was being served, as it is every day during the show and sale. Pric-es for pots range from $60 to $5,200.
The red dot under Mr. Peck’s sleeping-dog yixing teapot ($300) indicated a sale as did the smile on his face.
“I have to move on from teapots to something else, ” said Mr. Peck, a 33-year-old artist from Rhode Island, “but teapots are on a roll right now. So I don’t know.”
The ceramics magazines are filled with announcements for teapot shows. “There were five big shows focusing on zisha teapots this year,” he said. “What was the thing before that? Pitchers maybe. Next year we may be standing here talking about salt and pepper shakers.”

A purple teapot, large enough to hold 750 kg of water, has been produced in yixing city in east china’s jiangsu province, the “beijing evening news” has reported.  the 1.3-meter-high, 1.7-meter-long yixing teapot weighs 300 kg. the work on its face is in the form of paintings done by famous artists.  wu tingsheng and wu guoqiang, famous father and son craftsmen, spent more than three months producing the teapot.

ZishaTeapot.co.uk is a leading online retailer of quality Zisha Teapots and tea accessories. We were established in 2006 in the city of Yixing China. The people at ZishaTeapot.co.uk are dedicated to providing our customers with a complete China Teapots experience. Along with our fine selections of Chinese Zisha Teapots, we also offer elegant tea sets and beautiful teacups. Not only will we offer a wonderful selection at a great value, but we also strive to educate on the many health benefits of tea and Chinese tea culture.

Teapot making flourished in the late Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), when people changed their manner of tea drink-ing using  teapots, instead of individual cups.
The boccaro teapot was warmly welcomed by literary and refined scholars during that time and Qing Dynasty  (1644-1911). Some scholars even designed their own pots and worked with craftsmen together.
Yixing boccaro teapots have been well-known for centuries. The clay in Yixing appears dark red after baking be-cause  of its iron content and various other chemical elements. With a perfect combination of artistic skills, the shaping,  poems, calligraphy, paintings and seals, Yixing boccaro teapots embody strong character of oriental culture.

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thousands of years, the unique qualities of the extensive zisha, a clay deposit found only around Yixing, a small town in East China’s Jiangsu Province about 170 kilometres west of Shanghai, have supported a thriving pottery art and industry.
Classified as purple clay, using different formulas and firing temperatures, zisha turns into several different colour variations such as black, brown, red, yellow and green. Though not as pale or fine as kaolin, it needs no glazing. And after firing, the product is solid and impermeable, yet porous enough to breathe.
The art of zisha pottery in Yixing originated during the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD). The range of traditional pottery produced from the clay base includes teapots, tea sets, stationary sets and flowerpots.
The teapot, which usually comes in round and square version, is the most famous of the works. The round teapots are made in the shape of balls, a belly, drum and piece of garlic, while the square works are tapered or molded into a polygon, rhombus or trapezoid.
Generally marked by their simplicity and exquisite craftsmanship, the teapots are also appreciated for their practi-cality. A Yixing pot enhances a brew of tea by bringing out its colour, smell and taste. The pot’s body seems to absorb the tea and trap its fragrance.
The quality finish of the tea and its flavour can be attributed to the porous nature of the clay ?consisting mainly of quartz, kaolin, mica and a high volume of iron oxide.
Yixing teapots were introduced to Europe in the late 17th century, providing models for the earliest Dutch, German and English teapots.
Since then the Yixing zisha teapots have grown in popularity throughout China and Europe, and are highly prized because of their design, craftsmanship and unique purple clay.
Pictures of birds and fish, flowers, animals and Chinese characters can all be found on the pieces, which are marked with a traditional seal, helping to turn the practical utensils into works of art with national features.
After 1949, the Chinese Government established communes in an effort to gather master potters who would in turn recruit and train a new generation to insure the preservation of traditional skills.
By 1979 the two Yixing purple sand factories were employing more than 1,000 workers to produce the teapots by using traditional methods, but private workshop still dominated.
Even today, as in centuries past, most artisans making Yixing teapots serve a long apprenticeship under established masters, receiving rigorous training in all aspects of the craft.
The reopening of China in the late 1970 and early 1980s initiated a rediscovery of Yixing teapots by local art col-lectors and tea connoisseurs outside the country.
With enthusiastic infusion, the artistic potential of the new generation of Yixing potters began to blossom. Young artisans created more contemporary styles and followed modern geometric principles.
Some works equaled and even surpassed the efforts of the great master potters of the Qing Dynasty.
This outpouring of innovation and artistry has continued with enthusiastic knowledgeable collectors eagerly await-ing each year’s abundant harvest of new designs and re-creations of the old ones.

Drinking Chinese tea is an elaborate affair, which involves everything from choosing the right pot to pouring the tea out the right way, an expert from China tells GUAN LIBING.
DRINKING tea is not just a matter of gulping it down.
Mr Zhu Changde, a tea expert from Jiangsu province, China, has a whole set of rules governing the brewing and serving of Chinese tea -and even the choice of teapots.
The 45-year-old is now in Singapore to demonstrate his skills at the Takashimaya SC Shopping Centre in Ngee Ann City. His twice-daily Chinese tea-brewing demonstrations end today.
While here, Mr Zhu aims to give people a better understanding of the famous Zisha teapots, which are handcrafted and produced in Jiangsu.
So before you go into the kitchen to make a cuppa, here are some tips:
- In the brewing of Chinese tea, the most important factor is the choice of teapot and tea leaves. Next comes the use of tea cups, says Mr Zhu.
The self-trained expert in the art of brewing Chinese tea says the Chinese from northern China prefer to use big teapots and cups, while the southerners go for small pots and cups.
- Explains Mr Zhu in fluent Mandarin: “There is a golden rule in brewing Chinese tea — never mix the teapots when using different tea leaves. This means that there is no such a thing as a common teapot, because it will mar the flavour of the tea.
- “When you brew tea like Wulong or Baolei, you should use boiling water about 100 deg C and this should be poured into the pot from a higher level, so as to flush out any particles from the tea leaves.”
- Another golden rule is that the first round of tea made is never consumed.
Says Mr Zhu: “This is used to pour over the teapot and cups for a better shine.
“The second round of tea should stay in the pot for at least 30 seconds before serving.  This is to give the tea leaves some time to release their flavour. For each subsequent round, the timing should be increased.”
However, he warns that for a better cuppa, the tea leaves should not be used for more than five brews. Otherwise, they will loose their flavour.
It is also important to remember that in each round, all the tea down to the last drop must be poured out before brewing a new pot.
Mr Zhu has another set of rules for serving tea:
- The tea should be poured from a lower angle into each cup, to avoid spilling, “particularly for the more expensive tea”, he says.
- Each brew should be divided equally among the number of cups. He says that such skills have to be acquired through much practice.
He adds: “Certain parts of China have their own customs when serving tea.  In the Swatow area, for example, the tea has to be divided equally, down to the last drop.  But in Taiwan, there is an extra cup, which serves as the reserve.
“The tea novice should remember that all the cups and teapots should be rinsed in hot water and preferably be kept warm before being used. This helps to give the tea a fuller body,” says Mr Zhu.
Zhu Changde’s tea-brewing demonstration is on at Basement 2 of Takashimaya SC Shopping Centre today at 12.30 2 pm and 6 8 pm.
POT SHOTS
MR ZHU CHANGDE, married with an 11-year-old daughter, runs a business dealing in Zisha teapots.
Born in Jiangsu province, he was first exposed to the art of brewing Chinese tea as a child, through sessions with a granduncle.
To date, he has given numerous tea-brewing demonstrations in Hongkong.
But he laments that the people living in Yixing, his hometown, do not pay much attention to brewing tea.
“Despite living in Yixing, which is the main producer of Zisha teapots, many of the people make tea from plastic teapots. That is the irony!”

Xu Xiutang sits at the head of a long table taking the center of an arbor. Behind him is a large leather handbag with a protruding strap. The only thing that looks out of place is the mouth sticking out of the other end. Of course you won’t feel strange if you know it is actually a teapot in the shape of a handbag - made of pottery no less.
Xu did not make the pot, which is functional if you want. One of his apprentices did. As a 70-year-old grand master of Yixing zisha pottery, Xu does not need extra attention - he has plenty. Dozens of his sculptures are built into a downtown park, portraying local life as it was when he was a boy.
Xu started as an apprentice in the 1950s. But unlike most craftsmen who were intent on making good teapots, Xu couldn’t help molding the zisha clay into figurines, some of which could also be used as teapots. His talent for sculpture was discovered and he was sent to work on a public project.
That stint opened a new vista for him. “You can make products or you can make works of art,” he says. He nimbly straddles both worlds, but obviously he is inclined towards the latter.
Like the clay he uses, Xu’s work is nourished by local tradition and folk culture. But he is open to new influences. Sometimes he hosts artists from Western countries who stay in his 2-hectare compound and make whatever they  desire with zisha. His apprentices are also encouraged to develop their own styles.
Xu’s home is a shrine to all things associated with folk customs, especially those no longer in use.
Giant grinding stones form a circular wall lining up the driveway. Big vats and farm tools such as wooden wind machines are neatly stored in a hanger-like warehouse - testament to a bygone era. A pond with lotuses, an arbor and a wooden boat add a touch of rustic allure.
Only in the building that houses his bedroom does he display some of his own work, with the second floor serving as a formal exhibition room.
One look around his compound and you’ll know where his inspiration comes from - life as it is depicted in folktales, life as idyllic as a rice paddy, and life that is more or less preserved in this part of a southern town.

LIKE the drinking of tea, collecting teapots can become an addiction. But it is a popular one among those who consider a few pieces of fine art, or even fine craftwork, to be an asset in any investment portfolio.
 While the debate about whether or not art is an investment goes on with no conclusion, serious buyers continue to bid high prices at Sotheby's and Christie's auctions. Others haunt galleries, while the would-be art collectors scour mar-kets for a piece to get them started.
 And while it is, admittedly, more difficult to dissolve artwork into cash than it is with gold or diamonds, art has a value which is difficult to define in dollars.
 Art, like any commodity, has a value depending on who wants to buy and who wants to sell.
 While it may not always be useful in the same way as commodities coffee and rice, or practical as in platinum or diamonds, or even find an equal exchange as in the money markets ("your Picasso will never equal my Monet"), it will be as keenly monitored and carefully guarded as any asset in the world of high finance.
 The value of most commodities reflects their rarity, the need for them, or the ease with which they can be traded.
 Art, though, has a special place. Does any broker or investor love his blue chip stock, appreciate looking at his government bonds or enjoy showing off his forex account to dinner guests in the same way the art collector draws at-tention to his original Van Gogh hanging on the wall?
 As Mr Charles Garnett, sales and marketing manager for Altfield Interiors, points out, the benefit of investing in art is double-edged.
 It has both aesthetic appeal and intelligently chosen pieces can return high yields.
 "In other words, one of the criteria for buying a painting, or a piece of ceramic, should be that you like it," said Mr Garnett.
 Like any investment, every piece of art carries the risk that someone else might not be prepared to pay more than you paid for it.
 Of all assets, art is personal and in the eye of the beholder. To buy strictly for investment is a trap.
 And, even having chosen a piece which is original or at least beautiful, there is no guarantee that he will not fall out of love with it as fashions and interior decoration changes. This is where perspective - buying objectively - comes into the equation.
 And a collector should not expect that a painting will simply appreciate.
 "If you are buying a piece expecting a return in less than five years, you will most likely be disappointed," said Mr Garnett.
 But art is as prone to fluctuations in market availability and demand as any commodity. The death of an artist can, overnight, turn valuable paintings into priceless museum pieces.
 And when one collector hordes a collection, a decision to sell it in its entirety rather than as separate work can send the value escalating.
 So, there is the theory. In practice, art is affordable to the common man.  With no talk of minimum amounts of US$ 1 million required to start an "artfolio", it is both a pleasurable and lucrative means of investment.
 And, according to Mr Garnett, just $ 10,000 is enough to put you in the picture.
 Mr Garnett's favourite choice is in Chinese and Tibetan collectables for the obvious reason that, in Hongkong, people are on the doorstep to a treasure house of such works.
 "You could say such pieces are undervalued," said Mr Garnett.
 "And interest in collecting Chinese artworks is spreading as the Chinese population disperses throughout Canada and the United States, concentrating in New York, San Francisco and Vancouver."
 What will $ 10,000 buy?
 A painting from popular contemporary Chinese artist, Je Hegen, entitled Portrait of a Bai Woman could be had for $ 4,700. Works from Shanghainese artist Yong Ping, which were selling for around $ 5,500 three years ago, now fetch $ 9,000.
 Similarly, a painting by 22-year-old Wu Yang could be hanging on your wall for $ 5,500 and gaining in value.
 These were the artists favoured by Mr Garnett and could be found in the J R Guttinger gallery in Central and Zeestone gallery in Exchange Square.
 Other low-priced purchases include tsampa bowls from Tibet. These burwood and silver bowls, used for mixing butter, tea and barley, vary in price, depending on how ornate they are, from $ 2,500 up to $ 9,000.
 Ironically, perhaps, the value to the Tibetans is not in the silver, but in the wood which is a rarer commodity in their country.
 But buying art, as with any equity, is not for the uninitiated. Mr Garnett warns that reproduction bowls are pro-duced in Nepal and it is difficult to spot the authentic from the fake tsampa , although those from Nepal tended to be newer.
 But, Mr Garnett added, galleries such as Zeestone, Plum Blossoms, Altfield and Teresa Coleman, where such ar-tefacts could be found, would not be guilty of selling these reproductions.
 He said the value increased depending on whether the silver was the rarer carved silver or moulded.
 And what about those teapots?
 According to Ms Mee Seen-loong of Sotheby's, with $ 10,000 and a lot of patience, a collector could secure sev-eral fine examples of Yixing teapots.
 The town of Yixing is in the small county of Jiangsu and, of the 50,000 population, 13,000 are engaged in the manufacture of ceramics.
 Yixing teapots are made from three basic clays of the dozen in the area. They are zisha (purple), banshanlu (light brown) and zhusha (red).
 These teapots date back to the Ming dynasty and the most valuable are those which bear the mark or painting of the potter.
 The number of teapots made in the Ming Dynasty was small and the workmanship demanded by an elite clientele was high. Almost every item was a masterpiece and, today, represents a potted history of tea-making in Chinese as well as an attractive investment.